These good times may be coming to an end. Faced with a real rival like China, Americans will have to make some tough choices if their country is to maintain its pre-eminence. They will have to decide what they value, and for what values they want their institutions to be optimised.

They have four options for deciding how to share power in their country, all in relative competition with each other: loyalty, equity, legitimacy, and ability. How these values are weighted can have serious consequences, as the experience of other societies shows.

During his first decade of rule, the Turkish president, Tayyip Erdogan, relied on competent technocrats, who helped engineer a period of economic growth not seen in decades. Things have changed a lot since those heady days. Turkey’s ruling party has recently ditched its emphasis on ability, prioritising fidelity to Turkish nationalist Islamism and personal loyalty to Erdogan.

Erdogan and those connected to him have come out fine in this bargain, but Turkey has suffered tremendously. The Turkish Lira is in total collapse, continuing a long slide that hasn’t been helped by Erdogan’s recent decision to appoint as finance minister an associate of his son-in-law, a loyal supporter of the ruling party who lacks an educational background in economics. While Erdogan has ceased to deliver economically, he has waged the culture war with a vengeance, turning historic churches into mosques and polarising the public sphere in a manner aimed at distracting conversation from the increasing difficulty of everyday life.

This focus on loyalty and ideology as the most important factors in appointments to powerful positions is common in systems experiencing decline. One can also see it in the United States today, both from the Right and Left.

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Americans received a brief taste of what a country optimised for loyalty to its leader might look like during the Trump presidency. Despite the panicked rhetoric of his opponents, Trump did not, indeed, could not, govern the United States as a dictator. He did, however, make an obvious point of basing his political appointments on factors such as family ties and sycophancy, rather than a hard-nosed appreciation of who would be best at running U.S. institutions. His appointment of unqualified sons and son-in-laws to powerful offices gave a taste of what a Right-wing monarchy might look like if it grew on American soil.

The Left, by contrast, is advocating for a system that optimises for ideology. The ideology in question could be called “equity,” and its most influential proponent is the anti-racist author Ibram X Kendi. To remedy the long history of racially-based exclusion in America, Kendi advocates staffing U.S. institutions using reverse discrimination. “The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination,” as Kendi puts it, characterising racial disparities in institutions as ipso facto proof of racism and calling for instituting a demographic rebalancing of power in American society.

Kendi’s proposal for a regime of sectarian power-sharing makes sense on its own terms as a response to centuries of racist exclusion that deeply harmed African-Americans. But there is also a certain myopia here. It rests on the assumption that time is unlimited and that there are no peer competitors beyond our borders waiting to eat America’s lunch as it prioritises ideologically correcting the sins of the past for a generation or two. It’s not even clear if giving more positions to African-Americans or other minorities would satisfy these demands, unless the people being appointed also align politically with the rest of the progressive project.

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Kendi’s view is also based on a decidedly optimistic view of human nature, in which white Americans will accept overt discrimination on moral grounds over the long-term even if it proves adverse to their real-world interests. The heightening of racial consciousness and doling out of power on those grounds seldom looks good in other countries. The end result of proposals such as Kendi’s seems less likely to look like the Civil Rights Movement, which championed a religiously-influenced, colourblind view of society against racial tribalism, and more like Lebanon, where various sectarian groups fight for their share of the system while society as a whole grinds towards collapse.

What Kendi and Trump have in common is a desire to see power allocated in society on some basis other than ability. This is usually a sign of decadence setting in. The Soviet Union experienced a similar sclerosis after going through waves of purges focused on getting rid of politically inconvenient individuals. The Islamic Republic of Iran today forces many of its brightest minds out of power, or out of the country entirely, for being insufficiently zealous about the country’s post-revolutionary ideology or loyal to its ruling clerics. An expert on water affairs described to me how he was forced to flee Iran after being accused of purposely engineering droughts by political rivals suspicious of his lack of Islamist zeal. Water shortages today are ravaging major Iranian cities while experts like him work at universities abroad.

The United States is not immune to similarly perverse outcomes.

An unsettling truth is that the American democratic system no longer functions as a reliable mechanism for elevating the most competent people to political responsibility. The legitimate, democratic election of a wildly inexperienced and unfit candidate such as Donald Trump, partisan considerations aside, raised uncomfortable questions about whether the their system for choosing leaders by popular acclaim is indeed better for society than the Chinese Communist Party’s consensus-based appointments of capable technocrats. Given the American veneration of their own country’s institutions, it is unlikely that an explicitly anti-democratic tendency is going to take hold anytime soon. But a prolonged failure of democracy to raise the country’s best and brightest to positions of power underlines the shortcomings in prioritising democratic legitimacy as the highest value, even if the trade-off is deemed worthwhile.

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What if we did optimise for ability above all else? The people who would stand to benefit the most in the short-term are Asians and other immigrants, who tend to excel academically in U.S. schools and have ironically been among the most harmed by programs seeking to redress historic imbalances between black and white Americans. An America geared for results above all else might actually look less white in the halls of power, particularly if forms of elite affirmative action like legacy enrolment at Ivy League schools were done away with. The problem that arises in a diverse society, however, is the issue of trust. If different groups perceive themselves primarily as racial or ethnic categories rather than as Americans sharing one destiny, they will care less about whether their national leaders are capable than about whether they look like them.

A credible external rival might help smooth over the differences between people at home in the service of a higher calling. During the mid-20^th century, faced with enemies such as Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, the U.S. government was able to carry out incredible achievements like the Manhattan Project and the Apollo Program. Its accomplishments not only meant real improvements in how Americans lived but also served as advertisements for the success of the American system. The government was justly shamed at the time for its shortcomings in fairness and egalitarianism. But that shaming often took place on the grounds that institutionalised prejudice was excluding competent people from the system, particularly African-Americans and members of religious minorities. No one at the time would have argued that society should accept less competence while trying to fight World War II or win the space race against the Soviet Union. It would make as little sense to argue that ability should be demoted in importance as the U.S. prepares to compete with Chinese Communism.

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If the United States is to succeed in the 21^st century, and prove that a multiracial, multicultural liberal democracy is capable of delivering a better standard of life than China’s authoritarian one-party state, Americans will need to find a reasonable balance between their desires for equity, political loyalty, and ability. There can be measures other than abolishing testing at top schools to redress historic inequalities, including expanding trade school education as a leg out of the working class and emphasising the social prestige of such jobs. The stakes in the culture wars, though, will have to be reduced to something less than absolute, which is where they are trending at present. People who fall short of constantly shifting ideological standards, but who, crucially, know how to build things, cannot simply be shunned in favour of those who are practically incapable but who know how to chant ideological mantras and root out heretics.

The long period of fantasising and navel gazing enabled by America’s time as the world’s sole superpower is coming to an end, and for that we may have China to thank. George Orwell articulated well how jarring the move from fantasy back to reality can be for a nation faced with an external threat. His words suit Americans in the present day well. “We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right,” he wrote. “Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.”

When Parliament then refused to pass the deal the following spring, Lord Ricketts, a former national security adviser and ambassador to Paris, claimed that May’s last-ditch appeal to Brussels for more time was “perhaps the greatest humiliation for a British prime minister since the Suez crisis… When can a British Prime Minister have cut such a lamentable figure at an international meeting?” Good question.

While a few Brexiteers have also made the link (Boris Johnson once said that if May’s deal went through, it would be “the greatest national humiliation since Suez”), the parallel has mainly attracted Remainers. It’s not hard to see why. While some are old enough for it to have been the defining moment of their youth, for others, it is simply a sophisticated way to state their prejudice that Leavers ignorantly voted for some sort of splendid imperial isolation — a claim that has been thoroughly debunked by the historian Robert Saunders.

That has not stopped the FT journalist Philip Stephens from arguing (in his recent book, Britain Alone) that “Brexit, like Suez, was an attempt to chart the future by reaching back into the halcyon days of history,” the triumph of “an appeal to nostalgia over reason”. And David Lammy, who has accused “hard Brexiteers” of:

“still mourning Suez, Britain’s last fling of the colonial dice. Back then, Anthony Eden failed to recognise that Britain was no longer capable of launching a solo imperial adventure. Let us not fall for the same hubris today.”

But contrary to this stereotype, the Suez Crisis was not a lonely, self-inflicted error brought on by nostalgia. The reality is more complex and far more interesting.

The Suez crisis began, perhaps, at the UN’s General Assembly of 1955, when the US Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, extolled “the immense benefit the British Empire had been and was” in a conversation at the UN with the British foreign secretary, Harold Macmillan. The two men were bemoaning the recent decision by Egypt’s Prime Minister, Gamal Abdel Nasser, to buy weapons off Russia, after balking at the conditions the United States would attach to such a sale. The Americans had supported Nasser’s coup, but as their client turned against them, Dulles asked Macmillan “if we had enough troops to reoccupy Egypt”. Macmillan thought Britain had.

Once, it would have seemed impertinent to ask such a question. But Britain had emerged from the war deeply in debt; since the sterling crisis six years earlier, the nation had been in dire financial straits, because of an unsustainable balance of payments. After the Conservatives returned to power in 1951, Macmillan had privately compared the cabinet to the “directors of a rapidly deteriorating concern. They dare not tell the shareholders the facts”.

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A few months before Dulles and Macmillan spoke, Churchill — winged by a stroke in 1953 — had finally shuffled off into retirement. He was succeeded by his impatient understudy, Anthony Eden, who was also in no great shape: due to a bodged gastric operation, he was plagued by chronic pain. Macmillan’s report of Dulles’s sly enquiry as to whether Britain might intervene triggered a splenetic prime ministerial rant. “The big interest in the Middle East is ours, not America’s,” he said, annoyed by what he saw as the consequences of a cack-handed American intervention. “We are dependent on Middle East oil.”

The dependence was not just economic but financial: Eden was referring to the fact that the oil produced by Iraq and Kuwait was priced in sterling — a legacy of the fact that both countries, though never British colonies, had formed part of Britain’s informal empire. The Bank of England could always print currency to afford it, while sales to other countries provided a welcome boost to Britain’s holdings of foreign currency. The comparison of Suez and Brexit breaks down because in 1956 nostalgia played no part in British calculations. They were guided by fear of losing an ongoing advantage.

That fear had an important consequence. Based on another claim of Eden’s, that the “US has almost always been wrong about the Middle East”, the minutes of the meeting record an important decision: “We should not, therefore, allow ourselves to be restricted overmuch by reluctance to act without full American concurrence and support.” In mid-October, the British government made a crucial move. Without warning the Americans, it authorised military action to remove a Saudi force from a remote oasis, where it was preventing British oil exploration in Oman. The US had significant financial and strategic interests in Saudi Arabia, but the British found Dulles’s reaction, when he was belatedly told about the fait accompli, encouraging. He “did not like the news”, recalled one diplomat, “but he was not unpleasant about it.”

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The “Buraimi incident,” as this altercation was known, seemed so obscure as to be laughable at the time (it was the subject of a Goon Show sketch), but it set a precedent. Buoyed up by the ease with which they had routed the Saudis, the British now sought to press home their advantage by encouraging Saudi’s northern neighbour, Jordan, to join a regional military alliance with Iraq, known as the Baghdad Pact. The heavy-handed British approach backfired and, barraged by incessant Egyptian radio propaganda, in March 1956 the king of Jordan sacked the British head of his armed forces, John Glubb, following rioting. Eden believed Nasser had engineered this coup. If Suez is a formative influence on today’s Remainers, then Eden had been scarred by Munich. Fearing the consequences of failure to deal with the Egyptian leader before he became too powerful, he told a close adviser: “It is him or us, don’t forget that”.

It was not just the British attitude to Nasser that was hardening: so was the United States’. In the spring of 1956, Dulles began talking of “ditching” Nasser; like FDR before him, and Donald Trump more recently, President Eisenhower was keen to swing his country’s support behind the Saudis, who had started to see the Egyptian’s republican ideas as a threat. The previous year the United States had promised to lend Nasser millions of dollars to enable him to build a new dam at Aswan. On 21 July, Dulles announced that the United States was pulling the loan. Nasser responded days later by announcing that he was nationalising the Suez Canal.

Eden felt his convictions about Nasser had been vindicated. The idea that he was alone in this — that Britain was isolated in its approach — is groundless. When news of Nasser’s move reached London, Iraq’s prime minister, Nuri Said, happened to be in Downing Street at a dinner and worried that Nasser would only be emboldened by the takeover. “Hit him,” he advised Eden. “Hit him hard and hit him now. … If he is left alone, he will finish all of us.” So worried was Nuri by the news of the canal’s takeover that he even suggested encouraging the Israelis to invade Egypt.

Since being forced out of Palestine by a Jewish insurgency eight years earlier, however, the British had only the most perfunctory relationship with Israel. It took an old rival, and old ally, of Britain to bring the crisis to a head. Not that anyone, in drawing parallels with Brexit, would admit that France had anything to do with Suez.

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Unlike the British, the French had a strong relationship with Israel, and a direct imperial interest, since Nasser was supporting the insurgency in French Algeria. They opened secret talks with the Israelis that autumn. In mid-October, French representatives presented their idea to Eden: Israel would invade Egypt, giving Britain and France grounds to go in and order both sides to retreat from the canal. Precisely because he was unwilling to go it alone, Eden leapt at the French proposal. To allay old Israeli suspicions of Britain, the secret protocol summarising the arrangement was signed by representatives of the three conspiring powers. Madcap plot it may have been, but Suez was never a solo British plan.

The Israelis invaded Sinai on 29 October. The following day Britain and France, as they had secretly agreed, issued ultimatums to both Israel and Egypt and landed troops in Port Said on 5 November. The collusion was not hard to see, and under immense international and — more importantly — financial market pressure, which threatened to drain Britain’s remaining reserves, the two European powers were soon forced to abandon their military operation. The truth is that Britain lacked the confidence in 1956 to act alone. But had she done so, she might well have got away with the deception: it was high-altitude photos of French jets on Israeli runways that alerted Washington to exactly what was going on.

A sense of vulnerability led Britain and France to lash out. Britain, which owed millions to Washington, looked towards its creditor. France, on the other hand, turned to Europe as a way to preserve her empire from American predation. These complexities — in particular the role of money — are lost in the comparison of Suez and Brexit. But then its chief purpose has not been honest, but to denigrate the intelligence of Leavers.

Woolf’s novels are so serious and seriously good that they are, somehow, inexplicably bad. It’s a perverse logic. Take Mrs Dalloway: a little novel of 250 pages so ingeniously structured, elegantly grooved, impeccably polished and deftly brought off that it always takes about two months to read. Nothing so short should take so long.

For a writer so attentive to the twitchy, nervy minutiae of life — she called them “moments of being” — it is amazing how often Woolf died. Not just the watery one eighty years ago, when she left one of the all-time great “I’ve had enough of this nonsense” suicide notes, loaded her pockets with heavy stones and toppled into the River Ouse.

She died first when her mother died in 1895. Julia Stephen was 49, Virginia barely 14. “Nothing was left,” she would later write, “… a dark cloud settled over us; we seemed to sit all together cooped up, solemn, unreal, under a haze of heavy emotion”. Her essayist father, a busy, hill-climbing Victorian scarecrow with a today impossible name (Leslie), was no support to Virginia, her sisters or her brothers.

It was a matter of space as much as anything. After Julia’s death, eleven Stephens’s and seven live-in servants dwelled up, down and under three stories in 22 Hyde Park Gate — like lobsters scuttling about inside a vent. “How,” Virginia wrote in one of her teenage diaries, “is one to live in such a world?” Of course, she would later call for a room of her own; these days she would have justly demanded a Peloton, and a podcast of her own too.

Worse waited outside the house in society, where Virginia would die again. Her priggish cousin George Duckworth, who both sexually assaulted her and published her first novel, started taking her to parties when she was eighteen. She wore long white satin dresses, pinned with three pink carnations.

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Other people’s parties are generally much more fun to read about than attend. So it is with the ball at Lady Sligo’s mansion which Virginia was spirited to in June 1900. The solid, rumbling reign of Queen Victoria had just a few months left to run; Victorianism — that thicket of customs, manners and morals — would last a few years longer still. Decades later, Woolf wrote about the party: the vinegary dowager aunts swarming about, the long dining tables plastered with silver, the heavy bachelor colonels exhaling expensive cigar fumes, the walls ringing with complaints about gout and the talk of young men not yet pulled into the whirlpool of the new century.

All this in a world where hansom cabs still waited outside theatres, where turtle soup was what rich people called medicine, where self-care meant reading Homer not downloading a used-once meditation app, where every family had a grandfather who lost an eye during the Indian Mutiny. All this, all around; the exquisite champagne arrogance of power that would soon — sooner than the men in the smoking rooms realised — melt away.

So Virginia blushed, and hid behind a curtain.

She wrote to her sister in the following days: “We are failures. Really, we can’t shine in Society. I don’t know how it’s done. We ain’t popular — we sit in corners and look like mutes who are longing for a funeral.” A funeral: dead again.

The memories — and the resentments — are worked on in the later reminiscences, written in 1920. The fault is not hers; the pink carnations were good. The world was wrong: “I could not get young men to talk… the pressure of society almost forbade any natural feeling… society in those days was a very competent machine. It was convinced that girls must be changed into married women.”

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Artists always think the world is wrong. Circumstances are refashioned to fit their ideas. Then they make their own world. Virginia’s was the Bloomsbury group. Bloomsbury was not so different from Lady Sligo’s ballroom. Its members — Virginia, her sister Vanessa, Lytton Strachey, Leonard Woolf, Clive Bell, and John Maynard Keynes — were part of the owning, quality class. Their ancestors were judges and civil servants, imperial operatives and dons, manufacturers and Quakers; none had been peasants for generations. They were never proletarians.

The difference between Bloomsbury and the other toffs was that all its young men were unhappily homosexual, or like Virginia, too cracked up to enter society on its own terms. They were privileged outcasts. They wanted freedom from the constraints and sanctions of traditional morality; there would be no more hiding behind curtains.

In their world within a world, leisurely Bloomsbury developed into what Raymond Williams called a “dissenting fraction” of the English upper-class. Light, Beauty and Truth were the new values. They believed that if they talked openly about sex they would never be hypocrites. “We were full of experiments and reforms,” Virginia wrote of the group’s early days. “Everything was going to be new; everything was going to be different. Everything was on trial.”

The disastrous First World War confirmed every prejudice the group held about England, and made their work sexy and cool. Christianity, patriotism, well-plotted novels and realistic landscape painting looked like bumbling absurdities. The values of the fathers and grandfathers were laughable and philistine. With flawless timing Strachey’s Eminent Victorians was released in May 1918. Using innuendo rather than invective, Strachey doodled moustaches on the heroic statuary of a fading age.

When the grand Tory historian G.M. Young read the book, he said: “We’re in for a bad time.” “We” meant the old establishment, which preached, as Tennyson had, that “the path of duty was the way to glory”. It turned out that the path of duty was the way to the Somme. Victorianism was punctured for good. The young looked to Bloomsbury for its values in the 1920s — which is probably why so many of them ended up as communist spies in the 1930s.

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Woolf’s position in all this, T.S. Eliot said, was “the centre, not merely of an esoteric group, but the literary life of London.” In Jacob’s Room, Mrs Dalloway, To The Lighthouse and Orlando, she stirred the heavy dough of English fiction and discovered new forms. Being new was more important than anything else. The aim of her writing, she told Clive Bell, was to “give the feel of running water” — and so each novel is a strange prefiguration of her drowning.

The popular image of Woolf comes from this period. Here she is, the paradigmatic mad lady genius: wronged, misunderstood, impractical, oracular, ahead of her time and consequently not like other people, not quite human at all. Nicole Kidman’s fake nose won an Oscar for playing that Woolf in The Hours (2002), and this caricature was last seen in the grave, trembling lesbian romance movie Vita & Virginia (2019).

It’s the picture postcard version of Woolf — a mannequin on which any number of ideas can be hung, regardless of whether they are true. Those who knew her would be surprised to see her portrayed as a lesbian, or made a hero for the LGBT movement, given that she was terrified of sex. Anything more than holding hands was improbable.

What is true about this image is that Woolf never changes. She writes somewhere that “a self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living”. Woolf never managed it — just read the Diaries, where page after miserable page shows how stuck she became. Bloomsbury thought there were many ways of living, and many ways of feeling, but they were wrong.

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She began work on a new novel in 1932, when she was established as one of the most spectacular writers of the era. It would encompass “everything”. It would be her definitive statement on women and men, politics and society; on art and on life.

Two exacting years produced a useless first draft. In London, Bloomsbury was being attacked with exactly the same weapon — sarcasm — it had buried the Victorians with. Younger writers snapped at her heels. She thought of a provisional title for another book: On Being Despised. This was another kind of death.

Her diary jangled with nerves. Was her “everything” novel merely an essay about herself? (Yes.) When it was finally published in 1936, The Years was an enormous commercial success. Yet it was too detached, too backwards-looking, too voluptuous. Educated taste had moved on. “Live differently,” one character thinks — the same thought Virginia was scribbling in her diary at fifteen.

Once the war began, and Nazi bombs destroyed her London house, Woolf began to change her mind about things. The Bloomsbury judgments about England and the English were evaporating. Always a mega snob, Woolf was amazed to find herself admiring “every sort of person: chars, shopkeepers, even more remarkably… politicians — Winston at least — and the tweed-wearing, sterling dull women here… with their grim good sense.”

The deep conservatism of her country, which she’d disdained all her adult life, proved itself useful in 1940. It was an advantage to be dull, ignorant, sluggish, and unimaginative. The great majority “were hardly able to conceive,” in the words of one historian, “that Britain might lose the war.” It helped to carry them through, but it damaged her.

This is what killed her off one last time. The vast trauma, not only of war, but in discovering, so late in the day, that all her judgments were wrong. Oscar Wilde once said you’d need a heart of stone not to laugh at the death of Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop — true, but he didn’t live long enough to see what happened to Virginia Woolf.

Writing in the 1920s, DH Lawrence had foreseen it all. The son of a miner, he hated industrialism, which he believed had “frustrated that sense of community that would make us all unite in pride and dignity”. Politics had no solutions; it dealt in meaningless abstraction, rather than ordinary feeling. Talking with political activists, Lawrence observed, “is like trying to have a human conversation with the letter x in algebra”.

Exiled from Britain after the First World War, he set off an a “savage pilgrimage” before tuberculosis finally caught up with him. By 1930, he was dead. It was up to a new generation of writers, each in their own way inspired by Lawrence, to respond to his challenge to politics. They are the subject of Marc Stears’s new book Out of the Ordinary, which shows how the likes of George Orwell, JB Priestley, and Dylan Thomas rejected the abstract ideologies of their day. In using a language that was concrete and specific, Stears argues, they created a new vision for politics.

A political academic and former speechwriter for Ed Miliband, Stears believes that revisiting the output of these writers in the 1940s can provide a solution to our polarised present moment. The technocratic politics of the Blair and Cameron years have left Britain divided. Populism, both on the Left and Right, has failed to offer a convincing solution to years of economic inequality and political gridlock. For Stears, the answer is a politics of what he calls “the ordinary” and “everyday life”.

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In Stears’s account, Orwell, Priestley and Thomas rejected Lawrence’s “abstract idealisms”, refusing to fall, as Thomas puts it, “for the latest isms like pups for rubber bones”. For Orwell, vague and abstract language was the source of his era’s “political chaos”. It allowed politicians to manipulate the truth, and in its worst instances, to justify murder.

They eschewed the pessimism of the Right, too, and what they saw as grandiose ideas of Britishness. Priestley attacked what he called “Big Englanders”, Orwell hated “Rule Britannia” and flag-waving officer types, while Thomas loathed Elgar.

Instead, they aspired to a language that was tangible and rooted in people’s everyday lives and experiences. For Thomas, “the everyday” lay in memories of his childhood in Swansea: “the pubs and clubs, billiards rooms, promenades, and the suburban nights”. For Priestley, in “filling stations and factories”, “arterial and by-pass roads”, and “bungalows with tiny garages”, while Orwell associated ordinariness with “solid breakfasts, gloomy Sundays, smoky towns, winding roads, and green fields”.

When the Second World War broke out, Stears argues, these writers were forced to reconcile their sense of unease with conventional ideas of Britishness. In doing so, they turned their commitment to specificity into something of popular substance. Priestley’s Postscripts challenged Churchill for radio listeners; Orwell commissioned programmes for the BBC in India; Thomas wrote radio plays and film scripts.

After the War, however, the country failed to unite around this vision: Attlee built the welfare state from the top down, while successive governments — both Labour and Conservative — enfeebled local government. Politics become increasingly technocratic and distant from everyday concerns. All the things that once connected politics to everyday life, from trade union branches to local newspapers, began to disappear.

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This is a compelling account, but how applicable are the insights of these long-dead writers to contemporary politics? Today’s politics has arguably become more, not less, abstract. Indeed, we live in an increasingly abstract world, where things that were once solid — from telephone booths to paper money — have melted into an intangible digital world.

In his book, Stears recalls a conversation with a Labour pollster who, in the 2015 election campaign, told him that people valued spending time with loved ones more than any other issue. Nothing else came close. When Stears asked him why the party didn’t make this more of a focus, he was told this — the issue that matters most to people — isn’t what politics is about.

But if politics feels distant from people’s everyday preoccupations, it is because its language so often fails to connect. Both Left and Right talk of “equality”, “responsibility” and “aspiration”: vague, abstract words with no relevance to people’s lived experience. Even when politicians try to resolve these problems, their language fails to bring ordinary people onside. “Social mobility” and “levelling up” are phrases almost unheard outside the corridors of Westminster.

This linguistic emptiness means that politics is, as the philosopher Simone Weil wrote, increasingly “peopled exclusively by myths and monsters”. The slipperiness of abstract words means they can “represent for us an absolute reality”, while, at the same time, “mean anything whatsoever”. We reach for abstractions to explain systems of belief and ideologies: “fascism”, “sovereignty”, “patriotism”. But too often these words are manipulated to smear political opponents or shut down debate. When this happens, the common ground erodes and polarisation becomes inevitable.

The Conservative Party’s risible “war on woke” is a case in point. “Woke” is a meaningless expression often used by proponents as a commitment to vaguely progressive ideals. For its detractors, however, “woke” is nothing short of the 21^st century’s answer to Bolshevism. If we cannot even agree the meaning of a word, substantive argument becomes impossible. A “war on woke” is like trying to catch a phantom. And when only 4% of the public know what a culture war actually is, the chase is futile, too.

And if conventional political language loses its purchase on ordinary life, voters will look for unconventional politicians to fill the vacuum. When Donald Trump, for instance, pledged to “build a big, beautiful wall”, his language couldn’t have been more concrete. This was ordinary language at its most ordinary. Trump was electable because he refused to obey the conventions of politics and speak its jargon.

That isn’t to say that Trump-style populists are the solution to this crisis. Instead, if we are to develop a politics that can connect with voters’ lived experience, specificity is a place to start. Rather than gesturing vaguely to “community”, for example, we should talk about the institutions that facilitate one: affordable housing, for instance; access to fields or parks; pubs, shops, places of worship and schools.

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Politics will never be entirely free of abstractions, of course. For politicians, abstract language will always remain a useful tool to paper over the divisions that run through parties. Concrete language leads to firm promises, which are hard to keep. And disregarding all vague words would, as Orwell acknowledges, lead to a kind of “political quietism” where big ideas could not be debated at all. What’s more, phrases like “the ordinary” and “the everyday” are themselves abstractions, with different associations for different people.

But a concern for the everyday would, in Stears’s view, bring politics closer to people’s lived experiences. He believes it might help convince them that policy is not something irrelevant and aloof from their daily lives, but something that can be created by them, and in their own image.

In the meantime, what’s certain is that too often, politics feels like a poor substitute for the things that actually concern us: decent work, relationships, health, and a good place to live. If we could move politics closer to these concerns, we would go some way to solving many of the great challenges of our age.

Like so many French politicians of his generation, he had been a resistance fighter and then a highly decorated army officer. He had participated in the liberation of Paris, so his intimate funeral mass in the country church at Authon — albeit one presided over by the Bishop of Blois — felt like the end of an era in French history.

But it was the secular obsequies a week earlier in Paris for another famous figure, Daniel Cordier, that captured the world’s imagination. Cordier, who died aged 100, had been the secretary to Jean Moulin, the First President of the National Council of the Resistance who suffered death by torture at the hands of Klaus Barbie, “the butcher of Lyon”, in 1943. Cordier had a fierce patriotism that evolved from a youthful interest in reactionary royalist politics into disgust with Pétain’s surrender in 1940. Three days after the capitulation, Cordier left France to join up with other Free Frenchmen to continue the fight against fascism. By 1942 he was parachuting into Montluçon as an intelligence operative of the Bureau Central de Renseignements et d’Action.

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Cordier was afforded a full state funeral in Paris with both Presidents Macron and Hollande in attendance. The location for the ceremony was amid the austere grandeur of the cour d’honneur in Les Invalides, the setting for great moments in French history from the revolutions of 1789, to the unjust degradation (and subsequent rehabilitation) of Alfred Dreyfus, and the full state honours for that selfless officer of gendarmes, Lieutenant Colonel Arnaud Beltrame.

Under an unsmiling bronze statue of Napoleon (itself made from Russian and Austrian guns captured at Austerlitz), a grand republican liturgy was conducted with Macron as the chief celebrant. To the slow beat of the black-clad-drums of the Garde Republicaine, Cordier’s tricoleur-draped coffin was borne into the square by ten officer cadets of the St Cyr Military Academy, whose vivid Second Empire uniforms and pantalon rouge recalled the glories of the army of Napoleon III, from the Malakoff to Solferino, and the countless fallen of Guise, and the Marne in 1914, when officers “thought it chic to die in white gloves”.

In fact, the whole spectacle — and the nearby tombs of Turenne, Bugeaud, Foch and Leclerc — is a rebuke to the tedious Anglocentric view that French military history is merely a litany of defeats. The deeds of Cordier and his confrères in redeeming the ignominy of 1940 are a refutation of that calumny alone. As was the record of those who fought under the Cross of Lorraine, from Bir Hakeim and Monte Cassino to the French First Army that crossed the both the Rhine (capturing Karlsruhe and Stuttgart) and then the Danube in 1945.

So too was the presence among Cordier’s mourners of the Chief of the French General Staff, François Lecointre — the man who led the French Army’s last bayonet charge when his unit cleared a bridge of Bosnian Serbs in 1995 — a reminder of the depth of the Gallic martial tradition, and France’s enduring role as a formidable military power.

Emmanuel Macron is clearly a frustrated thespian (he even married his former drama teacher), but he was born for moments like this. In a touching eulogy — in which he seemed to implicitly link the death of an anti-fascist like Cordier with what he has described as the need to defend the Enlightenment in a ‘struggle against barbarity and obscurantism’ — he remarked that Cordier was a man “with a taste for action and impetuous bravery”, whose life was “an adventure novel”, who nonetheless “always acted out of love: the love of freedom which justifies taking all risks; the love of beauty which led him to revere so many artists; the love of truth that made him write history”.

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But the most moving part of the ceremony came next when Macron, usually so loquacious, stood in dignified silence by the coffin as the French Army choir sang the “Chant des Partisans”, the great anthem of the Resistance.

Much like the startlingly homicidal verses of the Marseillaise itself — with all those references to blood-stained flags, cutting throats and watering the fields with (yet more) impure blood — the Partisans’ hymn is similarly sanguinary, including a call to “kill swiftly” with bullet and knife, and picturing “black blood drying on the roads under the sun”. And yet the moving line in the last verse ami, si tu tombes, un ami sort de l’ombre à ta place (“mate, if you go down, another one from the shadows takes your place”) speaks to the enduring power of liberté, égalité, fraternité.

As affecting as these lyrics are, there was something too about the unmistakably French faces of the choir, their beautifully precise diction, and the resonance of their voices amid those timeless surroundings that made their performance so emotionally powerful; a force multiplied still further as the camera kept cutting to an old man in a Foreign Legion green beret, sat in a wheelchair, seemingly lost in contemplation. He was the 100-year-old Hubert Germain — Cordier’s comrade and the last of the Companions of the Resistance.

All of this captures something unmistakenly, and touchingly, Gallic. When the British War correspondent Wynford Vaughan-Thomas was attached to the French First Army in 1944 their advance became bogged down on the edge of the famous wine country of Burgundy. Wondering what was wrong, Vaughan-Thomas hastened to the army headquarters to find anxious staff officers pouring over maps, clearly worried that their advance would destroy some of the greatest wineries in the world.

“At that moment a young sous-lieutenant arrived and said, ‘Courage, my generals — I’ve found the weak spots of the German defences: every one is in a vineyard of inferior quality.’ The general made up his mind at once: ‘j’attaque!'”

Like Charles de Gaulle, it is common to hold “a certain idea of France”. Such ideas might be idealistic and romantic, and yet despite our historical rivalry, so many British people are still beguiled by these stories of French culture and French courage. After watching the poignant funeral of Daniel Cordier, many of us might be moved to agree with Thomas Jefferson that “pour tout homme, le premier pays est sa patrie et le second c’est la France”.